In the goodness of the Lord, the spread of the Gospel in Sri Lanka, and the stabilising of assembly witness, have been blessed greatly in the past 11 years. In the December issue of Believer's Magazine, God willing, brethren in Colombo will provide a report of the work, with its particular challenges.
The purpose of this month's article is to give background information about the island, so that readers who are unfamiliar with its history may appreciate more fully the forthcoming report.
The Island
Understandably, the ancient history of Sri Lanka's people and culture has become overgrown with myths, legends and traditional tales. Nevertheless, few countries have a longer record of their history and, in Biblical terms, that of Sri Lanka goes right back to the events of Genesis 10 and 11. Those chapters explain the segregation of humanity into nations (the world population at that time was no more than a few tens of thousands), and the physical dispersion of those nations as a divine judgment upon man's impiety and rebellion at Babel. Originally connected to the Indian subcontinent, Sri Lanka became an island, after it was populated, as a result of an increase in the sea level. Today, it is separated from the mainland by the Palk Strait, a shallow channel that is approximately the same width as the English Channel between Dover and Calais.
With a maximum length of 270 miles (435 km), and a maximum width of 140 miles (225 km), the island is now home to slightly more than 20 million people. Only 420 miles (675 km) north of the Equator, Sri Lanka has a tropical monsoon climate with a short dry season. In the capital, Colombo, on the west coast, the conditions rarely differ from 30oC (86oF) and 80% humidity but, on the east coast, the humidity is generally lower and the temperature varies between 40oC (104oF) in the dry season, and 25oC (77oF) during the winter monsoon.
The centre of the southern half of the island is mountainous, the highest point being Adam's Peak at 7,360 ft (2,243 m) above sea level. Near the summit of Adam's Peak there is a rock formation called Sri Pada ('the sacred footprint') by the Buddhists, but reputed to be the footprint of Adam by the so-called Christians. Lower down, around the level of 5,000 ft (1524 m), many of the mountains have been terraced for the cultivation of tea. The climate in the mountain areas is cooler and very wet for most of the year.
The People
At about the same time as Abram was called by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees, the first inhabitants arrived, after migrating south through the Indian subcontinent, in the area that would become the island of Sri Lanka. Over the succeeding centuries, the ebbs and flows of population caused by wars within the island, and invasions from the Indian mainland, resulted in the emergence of two main ethnic groups. The Sinhalese people mainly occupied the west and south of the island, and the Tamils settled in the eastern and northern regions. Whereas the Tamils retained their Hindu religion, the Sinhalese adopted Buddhism in the 3rd century BC. Indeed, some historians suggest that the population was homogenous until the arrival of Buddhism from India, and it was the conversion to Buddhism by a large proportion of the Hindu population that gave rise to Sinhalese identity and culture. The outcome of that highly-probable scenario is that, today, the Sinhalese people make up 75% of Sri Lanka's population, and the Tamils around 15%. The remainder are often referred to as 'Burghers', and are the mixed-race descendants of islanders who intermarried with Portuguese, Dutch and British colonisers.
Cinnamon, Spice and All Things Nice …
Its strategic location has made Sri Lanka a hub for trade since it was first populated. In the 7th century AD, Arab and Moorish traders knew the island as Serendib and, as well as bringing their commodities from eastern Africa, they brought their Islamic faith. Other merchants, sailing south from the Persian Gulf, called the island Taprobane and, later, when European traders arrived, they called their new-found market Ceylon. It was in 1505 that Portuguese merchants discovered the island which, at that time, had Jaffna as the capital of the Tamil kingdom, and Kandy as the capital of the Sinhalese kingdom. There was also an administrative and trading capital, Kotte, near Colombo, that was ruled by the Sinhalese. An initially cordial relationship, between the Portuguese and the Tamils in Jaffna, soon turned sour when the traders refused to pay a fair rate for the spices they wanted. The merchants turned to the Sinhalese at Kotte, and the same problem arose. Such was the value of spices in Europe, and the value of cinnamon in particular, that the Portuguese wrecked Jaffna, invaded Kotte and, eventually, occupied the whole island with the exception of the virtually impregnable city of Kandy, high in the central mountains. The Lord Jesus stated the principle "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Mt 26.52), and it was proved when, in 1602, the Dutch threw out the Portuguese and secured the spice trade for themselves.
As the Indians had brought Buddhism to the island, and the Arabs had introduced Islam, so the Portuguese added Catholicism to the unholy mix. Holland, at the time when the Dutch administered Ceylon, was divided religiously. The south-east of the country was largely Catholic, and the north-west mainly Protestant. The majority of the nation's seafarers were from the coastal region so, thankfully, for what was probably the first time in its long history, the island had visitors who brought Mennonite and Anabaptist missionaries with the Gospel. But events on the European mainland took another turn when the French invaded the Netherlands in 1794, and also began taking an interest in the Indian trade routes. Great Britain was having none of that, so the Dutch were persuaded to request British protection for their interests in Ceylon. Britain mainly wanted the use of Trincomalee, a beautiful natural harbour on the north-east coast of the island, as a base of naval operations against the French but, taking advantage of Dutch weakness, in 1802 Britain swiftly colonised the whole island including, in 1815, the city of Kandy. British rule of Ceylon continued until 1948.
Coffee or Tea?
Britain's military and economic dominance of the world in the late 19th century ensured peace and order, generally, to the busy trading routes that brought prosperity to Ceylon. One industry had its problems though, because demand for coffee was growing, but the beans grown in the central highlands lacked body and flavour. Help was sought from the British tea growers in the north Indian regions of Assam and Darjeeling, resulting in a decision to abandon the cultivation of coffee, and plant tea. The change was so successful that a new problem arose: where could sufficient workers be found? The answer, in those colonial days, was simple. The new tea estates were in a region populated by Tamils, and there were lots more Tamils in India. Very soon, the vigorous recruitment (bordering on forcible abduction) of illiterate workers from Tamil Nadu, the south-eastern state of India, had provided a workforce for the rapidly-growing tea estates in Ceylon, most of them owned and operated by Scottish families. (Today, the Gospel is being preached regularly in cottage meetings held on estates with names such as Mayfield and Strathdon). Again, the colonial system proved itself to be very different from modern standards of employment. The immigrant workers were given very basic accommodation, and each estate boasted a 'wee kirk' and a sanatorium. The employers did not seem to think that anything more, including payment of a wage, was necessary for the wellbeing of these hapless Tamils, and the riches of the tea industry were amassed on the backs of such poor folk. Throughout the 20th century, as generation succeeded generation, so the 'hill' Tamils became a separate strand of Sri Lanka's population. The passing of time had severed any interest that India might have had in them, yet the Sri Lankan authorities still looked upon them as a privately-owned immigrant workforce. In other words, the tea-growing Tamils were stateless and friendless as a society. More people are killed by snakebite in Sri Lanka than in any other comparable area in the world. Most of those deaths, averaging 800 every year, occur in the tea estates, as the bare feet of the pickers disturb the vipers and kraits that shelter from the sun beneath the tea bushes. For this arduous and dangerous work, most of the workers received less than one US dollar per day ten years ago, and wages today are still very poor indeed. It is amongst these Tamil people that the greatest blessing has been seen in the preaching of the Gospel in recent years.
Recent History
On 18th May 2009, the authorities in Colombo declared that the 26-year long civil war in the island was over. Compared with the rest of Sri Lanka's 4,000-year history, the recent conflict might, in a hundred years' time, seem to be nothing more than a minor event in its ever-changing identity. However, the physical, psychological, emotional and societal scars are still very fresh today. The British authorities delayed the handover of power to an independent democratic government in 1948, because the tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority populations were very obvious. The British required that a Constitution be agreed that guaranteed equality of status, rights, language and religion to all parties. Eventually, such a document was signed but, very soon after, it was torn up by the Sinhala-dominated government. For many years the Tamils were disenfranchised and their areas neglected but, in a large and busy world, they had neither voice nor champion for their cause. In 1983, a movement was born that would become notorious for its violence and sheer persistence. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the 'Tamil Tigers', wanted to form an autonomous region that would have effectively returned the island to its two-kingdom condition of history. Atrocities were perpetrated on both sides of the conflict, and the human suffering was, and still is in some ways, almost beyond description. Not even the widespread devastation caused by the deadly tsunami that struck the island in 2004 could unify the nation and, for nearly five years, conditions in the east of the country were desperately grim. But the Lord was working, and that part of Sri Lanka's story will be told, in the second part of this article, by some of our brethren there